Or better yet, make the "PASS" text in green and the "FAILED" text in red. Or use a graphic of a green check mark and a red X, or anything else.
I too had a lot of trouble reading the player breakdowns because "OK" and "NO" look too similar (especially with the microscopic fonts most websites use nowadays).
Don't be obtuse. If I said "Former President Clinton, who lied in a sworn deposition about having an extramarital affair, recently questioned the honesty of President Bush." The entire statement is true, as we all know. But it's disingenuous because I am distracting attention from the interesting part of the statement (is Bush honest?) by trotting out a standard bash on Clinton (he's a womanizer). Most people who hear that statement will respond to the Clinton-bashing, either positively or negatively, and not to the purported subject. In Slashdot terms, this news submission is a troll, designed to provoke flamewars about Bush's ties to corporate America, and has nothing to do with the FCC or anything else. It's not quite a non sequitur, since it does relate to the topic - GWB's political ties are certainly relevant - but the manner in which it was phrased is clearly designed to distract from the main point.
Look at it this way. When you build a bridge, you try to make it as solid as possible. You don't want it crashing down, right? So you do everything you can to protect it against every forseeable outcome. And once that's done, you design the bridge to break in pieces; to break slowly rather than come crashing down; and in general to control the collapse as much as possible, even though such a collapse should be impossible.
It's the same sort of thinking here. We'd like to think that we can make intrusions into critical systems impossible, but we can't. It's idiocy to believe we ever can. So what we do is try to limit the catastrophe which occurs when one of these systems is broken into. These critical systems, by definition, can't be taken offline for any reason, not until a suitable replacement is ready to be swapped in.
If a bridge collapses, people are gonna die. But if it's engineered well, at least some people will live who wouldn't otherwise. That's also the idea behind intrusion tolerance. If my iPacemaker gets hacked, I'd rather have it trigger an irregular heartbeat than stop my heart entirely.
Er... I kind of take issue with your claim that some games are inherently too "complex" for women gamers. It's true that if you're targeting women you shouldn't count on too much previous game experience, but assuming they can't (or won't) learn a complex - but interesting - game is just insulting. If a game looks fun, then women will take the time to learn it.
No, I think the chief problem right now is twofold. First, video games are usually played by boys, so it's considered a masculine activity. And second, most video games are played by nerdy boys who are threatened by girls, so the social atmosphere is usually not so hot. I just think we need to reach a critical mass, so to speak, of female gamers, and once that happens they will start to get more proportionate representation. Yes, it's quite likely that some games (like Q3) will never see the representation that others (like The Sims) will. But the underlying reason computer games are fun is because of the challenge, and I expect that as more women become serious gamers, more women will realize that challenge in any guise can still be fun. Even if that guise includes blood spray, rocket launchers, and half-nude female models. (At least id was fair and made the male models horribly stereotypical too.)
If performance is increased, the cost will increase; if the cost is increased, the price will increase. Therefore, a higher-priced CPU delivers higher performance.
The problem with that argument:
Price and cost are unconnected: the price will move up or down regardless of the cost.
It's not terribly clear because he omitted a step from the argument, but I suppose otherwise the title for that section would be too long and unwieldy.
only relatively few well-heeled, game-addicted geeks are going to jump on the PPC just because it's a fews ticks faster this week
Believe me, no hard-core gamers are going to "jump on the PPC" this week or any other week. They wouldn't even consider switching until they had good reason to believe that all future games were going to have full-featured Mac versions released at the same time as other versions. I think it's very unlikely this is going to happen.
No, what this really does is give occasional gamers something to brag about to their friends with PCs. While the aforementioned friend is playing, say, Half-Life 2 and the Mac guy is burning with envy, the Mac guy can at least say "Well, my computer's faster on these benchmarks!"
They get a kick out of it. It's difficult for a non-cheater to understand; I know I don't. I'm an admin for a major online gaming league, in particular the Counter-Strike part, and we have people who have been banned five or more times for cheating. They just go out, buy a new copy of Half-Life, and join up again the next season. These people are paying $20 a month for the privilege of getting banned. It makes no sense to us, but for whatever reason it's what makes the game fun for them.
You're wrong about his point in this article. His point is that GNU/Linux isn't one atomic entity. You can break a "Linux" system up into at least two things: the GNU userland tools and the Linux kernel. If you kill the Linux kernel, the GNU tools will live on. (And vice versa, of course.) It will have a profound impact, naturally, but free software will survive. And in a month or two we will start seeing GNU/BSD or (gasp) GNU/HURD, or whatever, and within a couple years life will continue more or less as normal for most people.
I think it's a valid point. Obviously it's not desirable (I don't think even RMS is saying that) but this lawsuit is not the death knell of free software. That may be obvious to you and I, but it's not obvious to execs and other people not closely involved in the free software scene. It's good that someone with a reputable name is pointing it out (and it helps that RMS has seen exactly this sort of thing before).
Probably so, but back when NVIDIA first released their drivers it really was reasonable to stay away from DRI, do their own implementation of AGP, etc. Now I suspect a lot of it is inertia: if they wanted to rewrite their drivers to use DRI, they'd probably have to start nearly from scratch. This would take a long time, and the end result would likely be worse than what we have now (at first, anyway), so nobody would use it.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I think this is the direction NVIDIA needs to take in the future, and I expect they will take it (eventually). But it's not something that can be done in even a couple weeks.
(Actually, I am kind of hoping that this is the reason behind the delay in FreeBSD drivers: the *BSD and Linux teams are trying to work on a much more portable driver, which might well mean DRI. Of course, there are lots of other things to worry about in the FreeBSD drivers since nearly all OpenGL games are going to be run in the Linux emulator, so maybe it's not that simple after all.)
We have a fundamentally different view of governments. Americans view government as a necessary evil. The only real difference of opinion among us is how much is actually necessary. I don't think there's an American alive that likes our government, trusts it to do the right thing, or feels it should be as big as it is. This isn't a new thing, either; the Founders built our government feeling exactly the same way.
You think of government as a way of helping people. We think of government as a way of taking away people's rights. Obviously we want some rights to be restricted - like the right to kill someone and take his stuff - so we suffer ourselves to be goverened. But we all firmly believe that smaller governments are intrinsically better than large ones.
It's also a factor that, in a strange way, most Europeans are more jaded about politics than Americans. Oh, we think our politicians are corrupt liars too, but we have hope that they can change. It seems like most Europeans have just accepted that their representatives are crooks and have given up on actual democracy. Well, we're nearing that point, so perhaps we're not so different after all.
There is no morality to nature. There is no thinking to nature. Nature doesn't maintain things. Evolution is just so slow, compared to the human lifespan, that we don't usually see it happening.
It bugs me to see people blaming humans for this imbalance in nature. Do you think humans sprang fully-formed from the earth? Of course not. We're the product of millions of years of evolution. If you insist on anthropomorphizing nature, well, Nature shot herself in the foot when she made us, and she's got nobody to blame but herself. We're only doing what evolution commands us to (screw like rabbits and kill anything that looks at us cockeyed). Nature has absolutely no understanding of foresight or planning: that's what we do. We are improving on nature by recognizing the dangers in eliminating other species.
Gamers and people who use serious business apps can tell the difference. Ever ripped something to XVID on your computer? You'd notice the difference there if you had. On your 800MHz system you'd be looking at probably 12 hours for the whole movie, on your 1.6GHz system that might shrink to 7 hours. So it moves from an all-day project to one that can be done overnight or while you're at work. I'd consider that a noticeable improvement.
But getting away from the made-up benchmark, everybody in the computer industry is targeting those two groups right now: big servers and gamers. Those are the only two places where the industry actually makes any money. Gamers are the idiots who will pay $500 to get 10fps more in Quake, and businesses can afford to spend $50k (or more) on a single computer.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, though, because it's the way technology usually works. One or two interested groups spend obscene amounts of money on something that nobody else cares about. They make incredible advances, which go largely unnoticed, and then five years later people start seeing ways to apply the "useless" technology to all sorts of different things. The space program would be a good example of this. All sorts of objects we use every day owe their existence to the space program, which people continue to criticize as a waste of money. Sure, maybe the space shuttle doesn't do me any direct good, but the technology we came up with in building it sure does. The processor race works in a similar way. As CPUs get faster, software can add more and more useful features without impacting the performance of existing ones. Of course, some of those features are an annoying waste, but we still get a few good ones out of it.
There's some interest from users in seeing ReiserFS ported to other operating systems, like FreeBSD. Is this something the ReiserFS developers are interested in doing/encouraging, or are they focusing their efforts on the big moneymaker (Linux)?
Of course it had side effects, that's why we like it. The stimulant aspect wakes us up (people with heart problems beware), and the diuretic aspect means we get frequent breaks at work (people with kidney problems beware).
But yeah, for most people, a reasonable intake of caffeine is not going to cause any problems. I don't know if I quite buy the addiction claim - I had no problem quitting cold turkey - but then, I also had no problem quitting smoking (and drinking) cold turkey. Maybe I've got some gene that makes me resistant to addictions. And yes, I now have the most boring life imaginable.
It's a PC tower-sized box with 75 motorized trays. It has a keypad on the top so you can operate it manually (if you want), but it also connects via USB to your computer and comes with software to manage your CD collection. Two cons: first, the software only works in Windows (I talked to KDS, they have a Linux version in the works); and second, it only holds 75 CDs. But this second problem isn't as bad as you might think. What I did was sort my CDs into a couple different stacks. It turns out that I only use about 50 CDs on a regular basis. The other 300 or so got put on spindles and stuffed in a closet.
Anyway, the software supports many of these attached to one computer, so you can buy as many as you need. Obviously real estate starts to become a concern, but you can always buy a long USB cable and stuff these out of the way somewhere. Still, though, it's a pretty nifty arrangement, and I like mine a lot.
Well, I could simply concede that I was a bit too glib with that generalization. But that's not very like me, so I'm instead going to theorize that antique prices are a result of the inverted causal relationship in peoples' minds. Normally, newer things cost more money, right? Well, after all this time, people have gotten foggy on the "why" of that (they cost more money because they are usually better, and therefore they are usually in greater demand). Now they simply equate quality with high price. So some clever people looking to get rid of some old junk bucked the trend - which is to sell 200-year old furniture for what it's worth, 20 cents - and instead priced it so high only a few people could afford it. A few rich idiots, equating cost with value, bought it and told their equally stupid friends. America being what it is, everyone wants to act like rich people because it's easier than actually becoming rich, so the middle class soon started to collect antiques too.
We also have here an example of how the dumbest little things can be turned into a reasonably convincing conspiracy theory (a critically important skill to have on Slashdot). Yes, you're welcome; I do try to make the world a better place.
Who actually gets worked up about this stuff? The actual number doesn't matter; they could call it NHL 1, then NHL 2, then NHL 3, and it wouldn't matter. The important thing is quickly being able to tell which is the newest, with a minimum amount of thinking. The problem with "sequels" is that you have no way of knowing the endpoint. There could be an NHL 4 you don't know about. So we go with years. And here, the actual number doesn't matter, as long as the rule is unchanged. The game covering the (ongoing) hockey year could be NHL 2002, or NHL 2003. It doesn't really matter which you choose, as long as next season's game is NHL n+1.
Besides, this is not exactly something people are unfamiliar with. I graduated from high school in the Class of '97, which means I began my senior year in the fall of 1996 and completed my senior year in the spring of 1997. This is exactly the same way sports games are numbered. Sports seasons are more formally called the "2002-2003 season," but if you want confusing, look at a couple of those next to each other. ("Do I want 2001-2002, 2002-2003, or 2003-2004?") Besides, "NHL 2k3" is much easier to say that "NHL 2k2 to 2k3." If you have to pick one year, at least for hockey, it makes sense to pick the second year, which is where the majority of games fall. Ditto for basketball, I think (but I'm not sure).
The guy who wrote this article is basically an idiot. You know what? I have never gotten the wrong sports game. Nor have I even come close. I looked at the box, saw one number, and then thought "Oh, it must be like graduation dates." I then confirmed my guess by looking at the price tag. A game that's a year old is not going to sell for $50. If it is, you're shopping at the wrong store. The EA Sports games sell for about $20 6 months after they come out. So it's very simple, even if you don't understand the reasoning at all: the most expensive product is the newest. Anyone who's spent more than $15 in his entire life should already be familiar with this rule, since it applies to everything.
/. had an article on these recently. I can't find the/. article, but I can find the cited page. It's basically a hard drive and CPU in a tiny little box, with no keyboard or display or anything. This might make it ideal for whatever you want to do: it's smarter and more versatile than a simple hard drive, which gives you a lot more flexibility, and it's designed more specifically for low-power, portable operation.
I guess it's still in the prototype phase, but you might be able to work with Intel to get what you need from them. I don't know how likely that is - probably not very - but you never know. The skeptics seem to be wondering what the point of a "pocket server" is, maybe you could help give Intel a concrete example to provide to them.
The cameras come on with the cruiser's lights and siren. So there's your automatic method.
I don't think the primary purpose of this camera is to keep cops honest. I think it may occasionally have that effect, but the cops can always find some way to disable or destroy it. But that's OK, because really, the majority of cops are pretty clean. The cameras will be most useful as evidence against people the cops arrest.
I'm one of those pathetic losers who watches all the police chase shows, and in one a cop pulled over a car with two people in it. He smelled pot and took them out to search them. The driver came out without an argument, but the passenger bolted. While the cop chased him, the driver took a bag of pot out of his pocket and threw it into the woods where the cop couldn't see. Cop caught the passenger and hauled him back, searched both, found nothing. He brought them both in to the station (the driver had a suspended license or something) and, while reviewing the tape, caught the driver throwing the pot away. Went back to the scene and found the drugs no problem, since he knew exactly where to look.
Or the other case where a cop pulls somebody over and then just gets shot. The cop walks up to the driver's window and gets shot right in the head. It's happened before and it'll happen again, and while the cameras won't save the cop, they can at least pretty much guarantee the conviction of the guy who shot him. Higher-resolution cameras let you see more detail, like facial features and eye color, that can allow even more convincing positive IDs.
Anyway, I think this is the real reason they want the cameras. All the other benefits are great, of course, but they're just bonuses.
I can't think of a situation like that which can't be described using existing constants. What does EDOOFUS provide that e.g. EINVAL and EAGAIN don't? And for that matter, if it's a fixable problem, why set errno at all (snprintf doesn't)?
And the advantage assert has over pretty much everything is that assert always makes the problem apparent. You can ignore errno if you want. Of course assert isn't right for all cases, but usually "programmer error" means an error in the program; errno is most useful dealing with situations beyond the program's control, like no more disk space or resource starvation. Maybe I'm reading too much into that comment after the definition.
I got into a fairly huge debate on some Linux newsgroups on this subject. I suppose I should provide my background: I started with Linux back in the 1.0s, then eventually converted to FreeBSD at 4.4, which is where I am now. Many of the posters had interesting stories and comments on Linux source code, and some people (like me) had a problem with the... I don't know what to call it, kind of a snobbish anti-elitism (the elitism of people who hate elitists). My first post on the subject is where you start, in case you care which one is me.
Basically the same discussion, and basically the same problems. Neither Linux nor FreeBSD are immune to this. I'm disappointed to see EDOOFUS in FreeBSD, but unfortunately, it's an artifact of the hacker culture. For some reason, we equate expressing ourselves with acting like children, and so the attitude works its way into our code.
Anyway, I doubt anyone will find that huge thread interesting - watching someone beat his head against a wall is probably less fun than doing it yourself - but it certainly should show that Linux has lots of those people you seem to dislike.
But not as good as writing assert(0), or better yet assert(reason_condition_will_never_happen). I occasionally go on assert-spress in my own code, and it's quite enlightening.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, for that svelte, thin you, I recommend vodka and heroin.
I already have a table lamp. Wait... that's supposed to be a computer?
I too had a lot of trouble reading the player breakdowns because "OK" and "NO" look too similar (especially with the microscopic fonts most websites use nowadays).
Don't be obtuse. If I said "Former President Clinton, who lied in a sworn deposition about having an extramarital affair, recently questioned the honesty of President Bush." The entire statement is true, as we all know. But it's disingenuous because I am distracting attention from the interesting part of the statement (is Bush honest?) by trotting out a standard bash on Clinton (he's a womanizer). Most people who hear that statement will respond to the Clinton-bashing, either positively or negatively, and not to the purported subject. In Slashdot terms, this news submission is a troll, designed to provoke flamewars about Bush's ties to corporate America, and has nothing to do with the FCC or anything else. It's not quite a non sequitur, since it does relate to the topic - GWB's political ties are certainly relevant - but the manner in which it was phrased is clearly designed to distract from the main point.
It's the same sort of thinking here. We'd like to think that we can make intrusions into critical systems impossible, but we can't. It's idiocy to believe we ever can. So what we do is try to limit the catastrophe which occurs when one of these systems is broken into. These critical systems, by definition, can't be taken offline for any reason, not until a suitable replacement is ready to be swapped in.
If a bridge collapses, people are gonna die. But if it's engineered well, at least some people will live who wouldn't otherwise. That's also the idea behind intrusion tolerance. If my iPacemaker gets hacked, I'd rather have it trigger an irregular heartbeat than stop my heart entirely.
No, I think the chief problem right now is twofold. First, video games are usually played by boys, so it's considered a masculine activity. And second, most video games are played by nerdy boys who are threatened by girls, so the social atmosphere is usually not so hot. I just think we need to reach a critical mass, so to speak, of female gamers, and once that happens they will start to get more proportionate representation. Yes, it's quite likely that some games (like Q3) will never see the representation that others (like The Sims) will. But the underlying reason computer games are fun is because of the challenge, and I expect that as more women become serious gamers, more women will realize that challenge in any guise can still be fun. Even if that guise includes blood spray, rocket launchers, and half-nude female models. (At least id was fair and made the male models horribly stereotypical too.)
No, what this really does is give occasional gamers something to brag about to their friends with PCs. While the aforementioned friend is playing, say, Half-Life 2 and the Mac guy is burning with envy, the Mac guy can at least say "Well, my computer's faster on these benchmarks!"
They get a kick out of it. It's difficult for a non-cheater to understand; I know I don't. I'm an admin for a major online gaming league, in particular the Counter-Strike part, and we have people who have been banned five or more times for cheating. They just go out, buy a new copy of Half-Life, and join up again the next season. These people are paying $20 a month for the privilege of getting banned. It makes no sense to us, but for whatever reason it's what makes the game fun for them.
I think it's a valid point. Obviously it's not desirable (I don't think even RMS is saying that) but this lawsuit is not the death knell of free software. That may be obvious to you and I, but it's not obvious to execs and other people not closely involved in the free software scene. It's good that someone with a reputable name is pointing it out (and it helps that RMS has seen exactly this sort of thing before).
I'm not saying you're wrong. I think this is the direction NVIDIA needs to take in the future, and I expect they will take it (eventually). But it's not something that can be done in even a couple weeks.
(Actually, I am kind of hoping that this is the reason behind the delay in FreeBSD drivers: the *BSD and Linux teams are trying to work on a much more portable driver, which might well mean DRI. Of course, there are lots of other things to worry about in the FreeBSD drivers since nearly all OpenGL games are going to be run in the Linux emulator, so maybe it's not that simple after all.)
You think of government as a way of helping people. We think of government as a way of taking away people's rights. Obviously we want some rights to be restricted - like the right to kill someone and take his stuff - so we suffer ourselves to be goverened. But we all firmly believe that smaller governments are intrinsically better than large ones.
It's also a factor that, in a strange way, most Europeans are more jaded about politics than Americans. Oh, we think our politicians are corrupt liars too, but we have hope that they can change. It seems like most Europeans have just accepted that their representatives are crooks and have given up on actual democracy. Well, we're nearing that point, so perhaps we're not so different after all.
It bugs me to see people blaming humans for this imbalance in nature. Do you think humans sprang fully-formed from the earth? Of course not. We're the product of millions of years of evolution. If you insist on anthropomorphizing nature, well, Nature shot herself in the foot when she made us, and she's got nobody to blame but herself. We're only doing what evolution commands us to (screw like rabbits and kill anything that looks at us cockeyed). Nature has absolutely no understanding of foresight or planning: that's what we do. We are improving on nature by recognizing the dangers in eliminating other species.
But getting away from the made-up benchmark, everybody in the computer industry is targeting those two groups right now: big servers and gamers. Those are the only two places where the industry actually makes any money. Gamers are the idiots who will pay $500 to get 10fps more in Quake, and businesses can afford to spend $50k (or more) on a single computer.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, though, because it's the way technology usually works. One or two interested groups spend obscene amounts of money on something that nobody else cares about. They make incredible advances, which go largely unnoticed, and then five years later people start seeing ways to apply the "useless" technology to all sorts of different things. The space program would be a good example of this. All sorts of objects we use every day owe their existence to the space program, which people continue to criticize as a waste of money. Sure, maybe the space shuttle doesn't do me any direct good, but the technology we came up with in building it sure does. The processor race works in a similar way. As CPUs get faster, software can add more and more useful features without impacting the performance of existing ones. Of course, some of those features are an annoying waste, but we still get a few good ones out of it.
There's some interest from users in seeing ReiserFS ported to other operating systems, like FreeBSD. Is this something the ReiserFS developers are interested in doing/encouraging, or are they focusing their efforts on the big moneymaker (Linux)?
But yeah, for most people, a reasonable intake of caffeine is not going to cause any problems. I don't know if I quite buy the addiction claim - I had no problem quitting cold turkey - but then, I also had no problem quitting smoking (and drinking) cold turkey. Maybe I've got some gene that makes me resistant to addictions. And yes, I now have the most boring life imaginable.
(Preview, preview, preview!)
Anyway, the software supports many of these attached to one computer, so you can buy as many as you need. Obviously real estate starts to become a concern, but you can always buy a long USB cable and stuff these out of the way somewhere. Still, though, it's a pretty nifty arrangement, and I like mine a lot.
We also have here an example of how the dumbest little things can be turned into a reasonably convincing conspiracy theory (a critically important skill to have on Slashdot). Yes, you're welcome; I do try to make the world a better place.
Besides, this is not exactly something people are unfamiliar with. I graduated from high school in the Class of '97, which means I began my senior year in the fall of 1996 and completed my senior year in the spring of 1997. This is exactly the same way sports games are numbered. Sports seasons are more formally called the "2002-2003 season," but if you want confusing, look at a couple of those next to each other. ("Do I want 2001-2002, 2002-2003, or 2003-2004?") Besides, "NHL 2k3" is much easier to say that "NHL 2k2 to 2k3." If you have to pick one year, at least for hockey, it makes sense to pick the second year, which is where the majority of games fall. Ditto for basketball, I think (but I'm not sure).
The guy who wrote this article is basically an idiot. You know what? I have never gotten the wrong sports game. Nor have I even come close. I looked at the box, saw one number, and then thought "Oh, it must be like graduation dates." I then confirmed my guess by looking at the price tag. A game that's a year old is not going to sell for $50. If it is, you're shopping at the wrong store. The EA Sports games sell for about $20 6 months after they come out. So it's very simple, even if you don't understand the reasoning at all: the most expensive product is the newest. Anyone who's spent more than $15 in his entire life should already be familiar with this rule, since it applies to everything.
I guess it's still in the prototype phase, but you might be able to work with Intel to get what you need from them. I don't know how likely that is - probably not very - but you never know. The skeptics seem to be wondering what the point of a "pocket server" is, maybe you could help give Intel a concrete example to provide to them.
I don't think the primary purpose of this camera is to keep cops honest. I think it may occasionally have that effect, but the cops can always find some way to disable or destroy it. But that's OK, because really, the majority of cops are pretty clean. The cameras will be most useful as evidence against people the cops arrest.
I'm one of those pathetic losers who watches all the police chase shows, and in one a cop pulled over a car with two people in it. He smelled pot and took them out to search them. The driver came out without an argument, but the passenger bolted. While the cop chased him, the driver took a bag of pot out of his pocket and threw it into the woods where the cop couldn't see. Cop caught the passenger and hauled him back, searched both, found nothing. He brought them both in to the station (the driver had a suspended license or something) and, while reviewing the tape, caught the driver throwing the pot away. Went back to the scene and found the drugs no problem, since he knew exactly where to look.
Or the other case where a cop pulls somebody over and then just gets shot. The cop walks up to the driver's window and gets shot right in the head. It's happened before and it'll happen again, and while the cameras won't save the cop, they can at least pretty much guarantee the conviction of the guy who shot him. Higher-resolution cameras let you see more detail, like facial features and eye color, that can allow even more convincing positive IDs.
Anyway, I think this is the real reason they want the cameras. All the other benefits are great, of course, but they're just bonuses.
And the advantage assert has over pretty much everything is that assert always makes the problem apparent. You can ignore errno if you want. Of course assert isn't right for all cases, but usually "programmer error" means an error in the program; errno is most useful dealing with situations beyond the program's control, like no more disk space or resource starvation. Maybe I'm reading too much into that comment after the definition.
Basically the same discussion, and basically the same problems. Neither Linux nor FreeBSD are immune to this. I'm disappointed to see EDOOFUS in FreeBSD, but unfortunately, it's an artifact of the hacker culture. For some reason, we equate expressing ourselves with acting like children, and so the attitude works its way into our code.
Anyway, I doubt anyone will find that huge thread interesting - watching someone beat his head against a wall is probably less fun than doing it yourself - but it certainly should show that Linux has lots of those people you seem to dislike.
But not as good as writing assert(0), or better yet assert(reason_condition_will_never_happen). I occasionally go on assert-spress in my own code, and it's quite enlightening.